


you didn't

by Random_ag



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anger, Brothers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24858094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Random_ag/pseuds/Random_ag
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	you didn't

It was a moment of weakness.

Silvestro looked at him, crouched on the floor, hands rasping softly at the pavemnet and a shoulder leaning against the wall, and saw red.

He clenched teeth and fist and let the rage flow from his lips.

“I hate you.”

His face twisted with every word.

“I _hate_ you.”

Not a single answer. Of course.

“You took _everything_ from me. You took my life, my _ability_ to live, my family-” he held up hs handless wrist, “-my body! You _leeched_ off of me! You sucked the _blood,_ the _air_ out of me! You took all you could and never gave anything back! You tortured me! You _destroyed_ me! And you were never sorry!”

No response. Of course.

Or at least, so it seemed at first.

“I hate you.”

Eska’s gravely, scratched voice reached him with a murmur.

“I _hate_ you.”

Parroting him? Was that what he was doing? Repeating his own words back at him like a broken clockwork engine stuck in its old, flawed mechanical movements because it knows not what else to do?

“You took _everything_ from me.”

But it was different.

The tone was different.

“You took my life. My ability to live.”

Eska was rising to his feet. Slowly, as he always did. As all of his movements seemed to be.

“My family.”

But in the slow, endless rising, Silvestro noticed scars and reminders of bruises on the thin, thin limbs.

“My body.”

Scars and bruises that were not the result of animals acting out on hunger, or dangers of the job.

Scars and bruises Silvestro recognized.

“You leeched off of me.”

He had made them, after all.

“Sucked the blood and air out of me.”

Eska’s thumbs rose, slowly, to his mask’s chin.

He pulled it up carefully, carefully, carefully. His slow, precise movements made it seem as if he was peeling away his own skin instead of a wooden structure. Silvestro wasn’t sure he wanted to see what was underneath it.

“You took all you could, and never gave _anything_ back.”

He’d thought he’d see pulsing flesh and writhing muscles. He’d thought there would have been blood. He thought there would have been his brains and eyes suspended in the air. He’d thought he would have remembered his face.

But he didn’t.

He didn’t remember it at all.

It was… It was his own. It had to be his own. But it was so different. He didn’t recognize any of the freckles or moles, their position completely alien to him. He’d forgotten of the dot just below his mouth, the broken nose, the bushy eyebrows. He’d never seen the old lines tracing across the cinnamon skin.

He’d never hoped to ever see his twin again.

But he looked so different.

He looked so different from him.

So different in his distorted sameness.

The eyes were so wide.

“You were supposed to _starve_.”

Silvestro had never liked his mask - it was unnatural, he said, it was stupid and ridiculous and horrible, but God, God what he would have given to see the words slip out of its unchanging grin, because Eska spoke slowly, enounciating clearly every vowel and consonant, and the way his mouth distorted, opened, closed around his teeth was the most frightening thing he’d ever witnessed.

“You killed my brother.” Eska whispered. His hands wrapped around his twin’s neck, pulling a his skin, but didn’t squeeze.

“You took the food from out of his mouth and watched him starve. Cut his head to make it yours. Dug a hole in the ground, and left him there, and buried him in lilac to hide the smell.”

Silvestro tried to struggle. His hand wrapped around a wrist as his stumped forearm tried to push the much longer, much thinner arm down to free his throat.

“Everyone you do not like, you make them starve, and leave them in a hole full of lilac.”

The claws did not budge.

“There was a hole for me too, wasn’t there?”

“ _You_ are the reason I’m like this!” he tried to defend himself. “Do you know how insane it can drive a man? To spend _all_ of his _life_ stuck with someone like you?”

The broken nails of sharp thumbs pressed under his chin to rise it up. He could feel them almost piercing through his skin with agonizing, mind numbing tardiness, driving him to look upwards in a manner only barely unlike torture.

Eska observed him with a slight tilt of his head, with the curiosity of young predators.

“ _You_ are the reason I am like _this_.” he repeated, taking a step towards him.

But his voice pointed at his own body, at the signs covering it. And it pointed at his own hands, at how they were clasped around his neck, and at the anger seeping out of his so very big eyes, and at the movements of his muscles, pregnant with tremors that revealed something wild and unspeakable and so, so, so right for him to feel towards the man whose life he held in his clutches.

Silvestro took a step back.

“Do you know how _insane_ it can drive a man?” Eska asked, pushing his bare feet forward with his brother’s every attempt at escaping by walking backwards, “To spend all of his life, _stuck_ with someone like _you_?”

His voice was a whisper, a soft whisper.

Silvestro stumbled only to find his back straightened by the wall.

Eska leaned into his face.

They were so close.

He couldn’t remember a moment in his life when they had been so close.

“I am ill.” the misshapen mouth breathed against him: “I have always been.”

Silvestro felt weight that was not his pile upon his shoulders.

“It was only us in that room. You, Karpos, Agnes, my brother. And me.”

He was pushing him down. From the loose clutch around his neck Eska was pushing him down, slowly, piling up stress on his ankles to make them collapse.

“They weren’t real, were they?”

It was barely a hiss.

“They weren’t there, but I couldn’t know. Couldn’t know. Was ill. I was _ill_ , and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Silvestro’s head was spinning. There was a sense of deja-vu in all of this, but he couldn’t understand - where had he experience this moment before? When had his brother treated him like, terrorized him like this, spoken to him like this?

“I killed Agnes.” the canines lunged forward at every word, ”Cut him into pieces. The cold killed Karpos. Killed him until he turned blue. And _you_.”

His foot slid to escape the pressure. His hand clung to the bony arm for dear life.

“You were supposed to _starve_.”

For a moment, a single moment, he feared his head would get caught in the immense maw and severed in a single bite.

“I was supposed to have a _brother_.”

He didn’t recognize him. He didn’t recognize him at all.

“And I was stuck…”

He wasn’t the monster so beloved by the other employees, he wasn’t the cretin that allowed pests to invade his brother’s house, he wasn’t the soulless husk dragging its feet after him, he wasn’t the scared misshapen five year old child with a box hanging around his head, looking fearfully at his twin as he -

“… With _you_.”

It was a flash.

A flash of blue.

He understood it now.

It had been just - a little jarring, maybe, to find the positions reversed.

Because that scene, that terrorizing and frightening, the harsh words and the fear curling like an enormous worm all around him, he remembered now, he’d lived it - but instead of long hands around a neck there were small fists threatening to break a skull; and instead of clean blue eyes now there was an orange iris and one like clear water.

Now Eska was threatening Silvestro.

It hadn’t been like that, back then.

It hadn’t been like that.

Eska leaned closer. Silvestro could feel his breath on his skin. It was cold.

“Tell me.” Eska demanded.

He had stopped pushing.

“Tell me how I hurt you.”

He couldn’t.

“How I destroyed you.”

He couldn’t.

“How I ruined you.”

He couldn’t.

“Tell me how I _deserved_ to have someone like you beside me all my life.”

He was trembling. He was trembling and his mouth was agape. He could feel his lip shake with freight at every breath.

But he couldn’t.

He was not dropped; he was lowered. When Eska’s hands left his throat without leaving so much as a mark, he was sitting on the floor. His brother turned his back to him, and something violently climbed out of his esophagus in a panic. 

“Tell me.” his voice shook out of his mouth.

The bicolored gaze pierced, still naked without its wooden frame.

Silvestro swallowed.

“Tell me how I hurt you, how I destroyed you, how I ruined you.” there was no bile in his voice, no hatred, no intent to ridicule. He couldn’t find other words. “Tell me how I deserved to have someone like you beside me all my life.”

He didn’t know where he was going with it.

But his brother’s face was naked before him after eighteen years and God knew when again he would have had the chance to see it again, and something had cried out from inside of him, some kind of conscience, and suddenly he wanted forgiveness. He craved it like a starving dog rummaging through trash bins in the streets, uncaring of anything, only wanting to hear those words directed at him: I forgive you.

I can be better, his mind raced too fast for him to say anything. I can be better.

Eska stared.

His back was straight and his eyes ablaze when his mouth moved.

“You didn’t.”


End file.
